Outer Orbit – old school Spacewar-for-one game | Hacker News Reader

Outer Orbit – old school Spacewar-for-one game

masswerk.at

58 pointsmasswerk16 comments

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I can barely get any velocity built up, even holding down the thrust key. It's not even enough to dodge a shot, let along overcome the effects of gravity.

Apparently slingshotting around the sun is needed to get any appreciable velocity. Start thrusting at 90 degrees to the line between the ship and the star as soon as the ship materializes to enter an orbit.

Yep. You can also wait for a second or so after materialisation to get a higher velocity.

What makes it even more frustrating is the wrapped screen. It's hard to predict where you'll go, while the saucers can trick shot across the screen wrap with no problem.

Are wrapped (toroidal) screens no longer a standard video game thing? If not, when did they go out of style?

That's a good question, I wonder about this too.

The games that have the entire environment covered by one screen all share this same frustration of getting surprised at the borders.

But another thing that also used to be popular was the infinitely wrapping environment (sometimes on one axis, other times on both) that would span across a larger area than the screen, which is still really cool. Some old windows games such as Vangers, Operation: Inner Space and Astrorock 2000 used to do this.

I guess both cases applied better to 2D games, specifically more arcade-y space stuff, so probably it went out of style when arcade went out of style, and when 3D game environments (specifically first/third person) became more prominent.

Another thing that I found is that implementing this wrapping yourself while using a commercial game engine, without actually fighting the engine, is usually quite tricky, as most aren't really built to deal with this sort of stuff. That might be another side-reason for not being as popular anymore.

I think, a bigger, virtual area may be even more difficult to handle. In Spacewar, it's an exact square and all of it is shown on-screen, including immediate transitions to the other side (which is replicated here), while in Computer Space, it's also a square area, but the visible screen area is just the standard NTSC 4:3, including a vertical off-screen area and an invisible bit of horizontal blanking at the side(s), where the saucers may hide, while still attacking you. Personally, I find the latter more difficult or even irritating.

I quite like how Star Control II does it. The camerawork is fairly polished, but the main anti-frustration feature compared to this is that there's a health bar.

They went out of style as soon as it was possible to scroll the camera. Your world might still wrap around but the screen doesn't.

Yes, it requires probably a bit of training: The trick is not to fight gravity, but rather use it (think Jiu Jitsu in orbit). It is meant to closely replicate the classical mechanics of Spacewar.

Compare J.M. Graetz's description:

> The first result of this new attention to strategy was the opening move in Figure 3, which was quickly dubbed the "CBS opening" because of its eye-like shape. It took a while to learn this maneuver but it soon became the standard opening among experienced players, as it generally produced the most exciting games.

(See https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/spacewar_origins/spacewar-f... for figure 3.)

This is accomplished by aligning your spaceship perpendicularly to the central star and firing your thruster for two or three seconds. There are various variations to this and it works both ways (cw and ccw). Like in Spacewar, the power of the rocket is just barely enough to escape towards the edge by keeping thrusting in a diagonal direction, but this will take a while. So the better option might be a slingshot around the "sun" in order to establish an orbit.

Hmm, I'll have to try that. I did attempt to orbit it but I just ended up getting killed by a UFO shot before I could get much speed going.

I have played Spacewar - or, at least, the old IBM PC port [0]. That one gives you enough thrust to overcome gravity, no problem, though it still effects your trajectory (and missiles) enough to make it interesting.

0: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Spacewar_1985

A fast escape route is heading somewhat parallel, but with a bit of offset to the direct line towards the central star. This way, you combine the power of the rocket thruster and the gravitational pull. However, the bit of multitasking (maneuvering into orbit and taking care of saucers) at the beginning is definitely the tricky part, esp. in higher levels. (But it's still better as in Computer Space, where the saucers may pound you mercilessly while you're still a sitting duck.) Mind that you'll have to do just a bit better than the saucers over the course of an entire level, so the loss of a single ship shouldn't be that bad.

Interesting. I remember playing some Linux clone of Spacewar as a kid, but back then I never understood how to work with gravity.

Right now, I've spent few minutes trying to play it as if I was playing Kerbal Space Program. Boost a bit to not fall directly into the star, then burn prograde at the highest point and retrograde at the lowest point to circularize a somewhat tight orbit, and then keep shooting at things.

If you enjoy this mechanic, I have very fond memories of Star Control II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Control_II) which did something similar.

I highly recommend checking out the open-source port "The Ur-Quan Masters" - http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

Might just re-install it to spend some time slingshotting around planets for Boxing Day... :-)

Except for the fact that the asteroids don't have any gravitational effects on them, which makes the entire thing pointless.

This is actually, where I started [1]. However, I was looking for a more concise gameplay that would have a closer resemblance to Spacewar's mechanics. And the most important game mechanic is establishing and managing orbits while coping with any opponents.

[1] https://www.masswerk.at/gravioroids/ (unfinished, but playable, sound is still missing)

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